—George del Castillo

“I’m in a dither!”

…said when campus or class events became hectic. We sometimes reminded him that we ALL should stay cool and not “get in a dither,” and he would laugh and nod so good-naturedly.
He was so cute, a good-hearted fellow. We were fortunate to mingle with such souls at Reseda. I remember some teachers for the subject material they taught, but the really memorable ones affected me by the humanity or style of their daily demeanor.

–Derrick Garbell

I liked school and was fond of my classmates. To this day I host websites that feature my schools, allowing my fellow students to maintain contact and share memories.

To their discredit, my parents fought so much that by the time I was 18 I tried to escape their discord by leaving home for college a bit early.

But to their credit, by the time I was old enough to truly go it alone, I still didn’t fully realize that my classmates with surnames Ortega, Fernandez and Martinez were supposedly different.

As I didn’t know that my Latino classmates were “brown,” my Valley was as white as it was flat.

I also didn’t know that the Dodgers of my youth, Maury Wills, Tommy and Willie Davis — were black, until I saw them firsthand at the L.A. Colliseum and the Stadium.

To my parents, the skin of those athletes didn’t matter. They had invisible skin, a non-issue at our house. I soon learned the Dodgers’ proud history, and their role in bringing Jackie Robinson into the major leagues.

But still, there were no Negro students at any of my schools until I entered UCLA.  That’s a remarkable feat of exclusion, a divorce from a whole group of fellow Americans, arranged by the seemingly  nonchalant, but relentlessly covert powers of racism.

Oh I’d been to YMCA summer camp and had black cabin-mates, and made fast friends with several, bolstered by the spirit of the Y. Of course those were brief, vacation friends. But even within the confines of a week at Arrowhead, I saw what momentary physical integration could quickly enable: nasty prejudice had a place to vent.  At the age of twelve I was shocked at how vicious my fellow Young “Christian” Men could be towards our black camp-mates; I was also amazed at how tempered and strong the black kids were at dismissing the ignorant jabs they suffered.

Looking back I recognized that the only substantive negative of integration was it filling the stage with targets for the vice of prejudice. It had nothing to do with the mythic  faults and inferiority of the blacks, which are non-existent; but everything to do with the deranged imaginations of those who were prejudiced. Integration gave the ignoramuses a forum to spew their vile taunts and slurs.

In college I would live with all races and nations in my dorm, and I attended classes with the panorama of humanity as well.

There remains one final, isolated series of events prior to leaving high school that colored my experience with color.

In my senior year Reseda High had a couple of sports matchups with Washington High. On a Thursday that fall we met in Cross Country, and the next day in football.

I was on the JV running team, and as the race was about to start, we lined up as usual at the chalkline of the Pierce College course.  I’d done this dozens of times in the prior two years, and that date the pre-race anxiety, the jitters bordering on nausea were no different. I noticed the runners from Washington were the same, nervously anticipating the pain and struggle that the next 12 minutes would entail.

I had a rare good run that day, and towards the end of the race I outsprinted a Washington runner about 200 yards from the finish chute.  He sped up as I caught and started to pass him, but I kicked it into a higher gear I seldom had.  I could hear him spout dismay as I pulled away. I finished fifth on our team, meaning I had “placed.” As it turned out my final sprint had scored the difference allowing Reseda’s JV’s to win the dual meet.
It was no big deal, we were only the JV’s, a fact made more acute by the Reseda varsity team being outstanding City Champs again that year.
But for we workingman JV’s, it was our race, and after Coach Tolson congratulated me for placing, as I was still cooling down, the Washington runner I had passed approached me to talk. We shook hands and he told me he was not used to being outsprinted. He was in fact one of Washington’s best sprinters, and just chose Cross Country in the fall to get in condition for his track specialties in spring.
“I’m not a long distance runner,” he said, but I confided I wasn’t much of one, either.
He introduced himself as “Derek” and when he learned I , too, was a “derrick,” he put his arm around me and escorted me to a group of his teammates and the Washington cheerleaders.
“Look here, no wonder he beat me, it’s another Derek!” and everyone had a good laugh.

The next day was Friday night for football. I don’t even remember who won, but I do recall it was close. But what was singularly remarkable for that evening: the Washington team and student body were invited to our post-game dance, an unprecedented opportunity for interaction with a far-away (Inglewood) school.  This was perhaps the only time that blacks would be on my high school campus during my  three years there.

But as we left the stadium and walked to the dance hall, the stage for ugly conflict was potentially set. A couple of the Reseda football players, still wet from their rushed showers, unabashedly shouted towards the now racially mixed crowd migrating en masse to the dance room:

“Did you hear that Washington grandstand during the game?  Sounded like Africa invading the Valley!”

Even more alarming were remarks I witnessed between two of the dance coordinators, “Let’s get to the hall before our visitors start trouble.” Their brows were furrowed, their gait hurriedly bent towards the recreation hall.
One of them was the lead biology teacher, a man with fastidious enunciation, someone who had impressed me as a freshman, but whom I now recognized as exhibiting less than clear scientific thinking when it came to matters about which he was prejudiced, such as pop music, the Vietnam war and race.

These teachers’ morbid fears were unfounded as the evening’s dance went joyously well.

There was no band, the music was 45′s and LP’s.

It was 1968 and it was our custom for certain songs to dance in what we called a “line,” a pattern seen on American Bandstand and Lloyd Thaxton. During a line song, the boys and girls would pair off facing each other, and one couple would gradually dance down the aisle their pairings had created. That couple then took places as part of the line, and another pair of dancers would mosey down.

It was a fun thing to do. No matter how well or badly you danced, this always seemed to be one time most of your classmates would tolerate and encourage you to do the social thing to your best.

I wondered though how our Washington guests would react to our dance customs, and the line songs in particular. Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” had just been released and was the 45 du jour, and sure enough it was cued first.  As that bass riff first flooded the floor I wondered who I might ask to dance, when I was tapped on the elbow. It was one of the Washington cheerleaders, and as she nodded to the entrance  of the dance line gauntlet, she invited me:

“Let’s stroll, cuz.”

I was taken aback just a bit, and said “Pardon me?”
She replied, “Aren’t you the Derrick I saw yesterday at Pierce?”

And with that we strolled down the line.  As I glanced to the shadows against the wall, I could see my biology teacher grimace, watching me dance with a cousin I had just met.

—Derrick Garbell

Mrs. Rosenblatt introduced us to Shakespeare and poetry. We studied the sonnets and actually performed Julius Caesar in our classroom.  I played Caesar and it was great fun being stabbed by that dirty rat Brutus Covino.

Mrs. Rosenblatt made iambic pentameter accessible to my otherwise Beatles & Stones-addled brain. That was her great  gift, a key that allowed access forever into the vast workings of the great bard.

In the forty-two years since her class, whenever I see or read Shakespeare, I often recall Mrs. Rosenblatt’s ability to tune us into his often complex language and to ease our comprehension of his plays and poems.

Mrs. Rosenblatt was just 24 when she taught us, and it was remarkable how she could quote from the great writers as well as from John Lennon and Mick Jagger.

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Bernard Goodmanson was by some accounts an eccentric among the stodgy teachers at straight-laced Reseda High. But his laid-back demeanor concealed his skills in teaching poetry and creative writing. He was also the sponsor of the school poetry magazine, Buji.

He would review some of our classmates’ poems in class, and I have never forgotten his delight when he’d discover a gem and praise it to us, explaining why it was “good” in his view.  If you look over an old Buji today many of those verses and haikus are still noteworthy.

Even Lance Parton benefited from Mr. Goodmanson’s tutelage. Lance was normally not one for flowery speech, but who can forget his “Symbolic Poem” contribution to Buji where he actually used numerical footnotes in the body of the poem, with fully annotated, numbered explanations afterward indicating what each word “symbolized.”

While teaching us how to learn to write, Mr. Goodmanson occasionally drifted into politics. One of my favorite Goodmanson Vietnam war era quotes:
“Communists drink water. Americans drink water.  Does that mean that Americans are communists?”

Goodmanson encouraged us to keep files on the topics that interested us.  On his suggestion I bought my first file cabinet, and remember lugging it home in my VW Bug after removing the passenger seat to make room. I still have that ancient grey legal file cabinet, and it is partially filled with articles from 1967 forward about LBJ, Nixon, war, Vietnam, capital punishment, track & field, baseball, communism, religion, drugs, abortion, etc.
My wife refers to it as “Bernie’s Box.”

–Derrick Garbell

-Paul Rakauskas